A long, long time ago when I was a teenager, I occasionally went out to eat at Klondike Pizza in old-​town Arroyo Grande, on California’s Central Coast. Besides being served free peanuts as an appetizer and being allowed (and encouraged!) to throw the shells on the floor, one memory that sticks out was their “white pizza.” Instead of a traditional tomato sauce you could have some sort of creamy garlic white sauce, although these days that sauce seems to be based on olive oil. Even now, forty years later, I remember the original sauce as being a truly scrumptious treat.

Once those problems were resolved I got the idea to try to imitate that Klondike white pizza of my childhood.

The primary ingredient of a white pizza is a good white sauce. I started off with my normal alfredo sauce recipe (down­load the PDF) except that I skipped the salt, and then pressed three large cloves of garlic into the sauce.

After applying a light coating of olive oil to my 14 inch cast iron pizza pan, I spread the dough out to cover the entire pan. Because I was making a pizza crust and not a regular focaccia, I didn’t put extra-​virgin olive oil, rosemary and salt on the top like I normally would.

With the top rack of the oven about eight inches from the top heating element, I set the oven to high broil. While the metal pizza stone was soaking up the heat I distributed the five toppings over the crust and sauce.

I put the completed pizza in the pizza pan back into the oven on the pizza stone for a second round of baking.

About 10 minutes or so later the crust had a beautiful golden color. Taking the pizza pan out of the oven, I transferred the pizza to a cutting board. Then I used my 14 inch heavy duty pizza chopper to divide it into slices.